Multiple lumen levels for personal light

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Glendwyr
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Multiple lumen levels for personal light

Post by Glendwyr »

We ran into an issue playing tonight that I don't know how to fix.

The players all have a sight type with personal light which has the default lumens = 100. We were put in an effect which created darkness which blocked that sight type, so I turned on a light with lumens = -101. That worked to block the sight as desired, but of course no one could see their tokens.

One way to solve this problem would be to build on the ability of a sight type to have more than one radius of personal light. For example, we could declare
Darkvision: circle r60 lumens=100 r2 lumens=200
the effect of which would be that the r60 circle would be blocked by a light source with lumens -101, but the r2 circle would not be, and the players could see their own tokens.

The better solution would seem to be to ensure that players could always see the tokens they own, but I presume there's a reason that hasn't been done already.

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wolph42
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Re: Multiple lumen levels for personal light

Post by wolph42 »

it depends on your style of play. Not being able to see is for some not being able to see anything. So youll have to tell you gm how far which way your gonna walk and the gm describing it. Others like to have tokens alwasy visible, one way is to give them a personal lightsource with range of a half cell e.g. in case of 5 feet cells: r2.5. This will however create softfog where the player has been...unless you reset that each time.
In short: its optional not default and that should remain as such.

Glendwyr
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Re: Multiple lumen levels for personal light

Post by Glendwyr »

Is there a way to do a personal light source under light, or only under sight? I can certainly understand some games not wanting to make anything visible at all, but then it would be nice to have some simple way of ensuring that you can always see the tokens you own even when there's a darkness effect which overrides your personal light source.

In practice, I solved the problem I ran into yesterday by tracking who was in the area of darkness and changing their vision types exactly as you describe: personal light source, range of 2, bright enough to overcome the darkness effect. But it would be nice to not have to toggle vision types back and forth to account for changes in illumination!

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wolph42
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Re: Multiple lumen levels for personal light

Post by wolph42 »

i guess its technically possible to do so with the use of ontokenmove and check the ranges of the ligthsources vs the positions of the tokens. Quite a bit of work though to create. That way you could toggle between vision types based on the position. I've created something like that for the bot a while back, you could check that out to see how that works.

Glendwyr
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Re: Multiple lumen levels for personal light

Post by Glendwyr »

Thanks! I'll give that a look.

Fibbo
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Re: Multiple lumen levels for personal light

Post by Fibbo »

I ran into the same issue in my campaign and I think it would make sense to support sight types with multiple personal lights, each with not only their own radii and color values but also their own lumen values.

I have the same use case as OP (player tokens standing in magical darkness). But to give you another use case I encountered:
According to the D&D 5e rules, there are several creatures that have multiple senses out to different ranges. For example, a dragon might have blindsight out to a range of 30 ft. and darkvision out to a range of 120 ft. So they would be able to perceive creatures in an area of magical darkness or, say, a fog cloud, within 30 ft. but not out side of that. I can do that if a creature only has one such sight type, e. g. by defining a magical darkness with lumen -110, a darkvision sense with lumen +100 and blindsight with lumen +150 but I can't combine these in one sight type.

What do you think? Does this make sense? What would be the best way to submit this as a feature request? The Feature Requests subforum seems to have been rather inactive for the last year...

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wolph42
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Re: Multiple lumen levels for personal light

Post by wolph42 »

Fibbo wrote:
Tue Mar 07, 2023 6:44 am
I ran into the same issue in my campaign and I think it would make sense to support sight types with multiple personal lights, each with not only their own radii and color values but also their own lumen values.

I have the same use case as OP (player tokens standing in magical darkness). But to give you another use case I encountered:
According to the D&D 5e rules, there are several creatures that have multiple senses out to different ranges. For example, a dragon might have blindsight out to a range of 30 ft. and darkvision out to a range of 120 ft. So they would be able to perceive creatures in an area of magical darkness or, say, a fog cloud, within 30 ft. but not out side of that. I can do that if a creature only has one such sight type, e. g. by defining a magical darkness with lumen -110, a darkvision sense with lumen +100 and blindsight with lumen +150 but I can't combine these in one sight type.

What do you think? Does this make sense? What would be the best way to submit this as a feature request? The Feature Requests subforum seems to have been rather inactive for the last year...
if these are for creatures, then i presume these are NPC's (iow: gm controlled) for that reason its not vitally important that the creature sees or does not see something on the map, for the simplest of reasons that the gm sees it anyways! Hence in that case I would make use of aura's for the different sight types, you can set these and you can differentiate between them on the map. HTH.

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Re: Multiple lumen levels for personal light

Post by Fibbo »

I mean, yes, most of the time this will be relevant for NPCs and the DM can evaluate what the NPCs sees or doesn't see, but
A) not *all* of the time. There have been cases in my game where a PC acquired some special senses that I currently can't implement in MT. And
B) even when it's an NPC, it's an area where I as a DM want to offload some of my mental load to MT, because determining who sees what exactly can get quite complex, especially in larger battles with multiple magic effects floating about.

And to be clear: I do have workarounds (and thanks for your hint; I'm doing something quite similar right now although not with auras but with differently colored personal lights for the different sight types). I just think if we already support sight types with multiple personal lights with different radii and different color values, it makes sense to also support different lumen values so I can implement the ruleset more fully.

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